(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . IVH: Cheap Trick / Heaven Tonight [1] ['Al Dorado', 'Chloris Creator', 'Excorpflunky', 'Zct.Life'] Date: 2026-06-11 Tonight’s selections from Cheap Trick’s third album, 1978’s Heaven Tonight. By all accounts, 1978 was one weird fucking year in the U.S.A. Serial killers dominated the headlines. A former beauty queen and wacko Christian launched a nationwide anti-gay campaign. The citizens of Love Canal learned their homes had been built on a toxic waste dump. California voters staged a tax revolt, ensuring decades of underfunded schools and right-wing bullshit. 909 people committed mass suicide in a forsaken place called Jonestown. Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were gunned down in cold blood by an ex-cop supervisor who would later mount a successful defense based on his obsessive consumption of Twinkies. I’m sure that millions of people looked back on 1978 while celebrating New Year’s Eve and raised their glasses to the toast, “Good riddance to one shitty year. It sure can’t get any worse!” Hello, Ayatollah Khomeini! In such an ugly cultural context, Heaven Tonight must have seemed like manna from . . . well, not from heaven, but from one very tight rock ‘n’ roll band. While 1978 also featured The Cars’ eponymous debut album and Blondie’s Parallel Lines, neither of those records featured the unabashed commitment to hard-driving, melodic rock ‘n’ roll. Some critics of the time lumped all three bands (along with The Police and others) into a completely fictitious genre called “New Wave,” but really, Cheap Trick’s high-energy, melodic music bears more similarity to the Jeff Lynne edition of The Move, mid-cycle Beatles and early Who than with whatever the hell “New Wave” was. – AltRockChick Surrender Cheap Trick is most definitely one of the bands the forged an entirely new approach to no holds barred, take it for what it is rock and roll. They came about in the transitional period of the late-70s, which in hindsight manages to work in their advantage. As a band they never fit into the “rock god”/”guitar hero” type of thing, but they were too clean to really be punk and too edgy to really be pop. Even though they were misfits in the music world, through their passion and authenticity towards what they did they turned that into their very identity. Combining elements of each aforementioned genre with a classic British style and a knack for absurd, tongue-in-cheek humor, Cheap Trick epitomized, if not invented, the sub-grenre of power-pop. 1978’s Heaven Tonight is where it all came together for this Rockford, Illinois group. Surrender hits with a definitive moment right away in the band’s signature song, marrying pop songcraft with the attitude and sonic assault of punk rock to create a fist-in-the-air anthem that holds up just as well today. From there the album takes you on a roller coaster tour of rock and roll. There are party-ready rockers (On Top of the World, California Man), retro British Invasion style hooks (On the Radio, How Are You), proto pop-punk (Stiff Competition, Auf Wiedersehen) and the near R&B of High Roller and Takin’ Me Back. The effectiveness of the album as a whole is that each song stealthily incorporates elements of the others into a collection of genre-bending, powerful, timeless rock. Around the midway point of the album are two absolute high points, Auf Wiedersehen and Heaven Tonight. The title track is a slice of dreamy psychedelia that lyrically (and musically) sees the band explore the dark side of drug use. The taunting almost-whispered vocals weave a tale of pushing the limits for the sake of a high. It is a brooding, ominous, and at times downright scary track that is undeniably hypnotic. On the opposite side of their spectrum, Auf Wiedersehen is the closest they’ve ever come to a punk song; and for a pop band in 1978 it was pretty damn close. The laughable, darkly clever lyrics are sung sneeringly with a growling cockney accent, and gain threatening momentum as the guitars grind and stutter their way through each verse. The crooning, preachy chorus fits right in with a wink and a nod. – Sputnik Music California Man Cheap Trick released one of the all-time great debut albums and its terrific follow-up in a span of less than six months. The group then delivered a rock ‘n’ roll triple play with the release of Heaven Tonight on April 24, 1978. Cheap Trick had already hit the road with Kiss, the Kinks, Queen and Be-Bop Deluxe, steadily picking up fans. But they were still finding their sound: Jack Douglas produced a self-titled debut that was a raw, hard-rock powerhouse; Tom Werman’s approach on their sophomore LP In Color was more polished and less to the band’s liking. “We told him we wanted it to sound like the Sex Pistols’ first singles,” guitarist Rick Nielsen later said on the “Off the Record” radio program. “He said he didn’t like the Sex Pistols, and I said, ‘I don’t care what you like!’” Werman won the battle in the end and, for better or worse, gave Cheap Trick their pure pop sound. He was back for Cheap Trick’s third album, but this time they met halfway, leaving the pop shine but adding some grit to the mix. “I think of myself as having popularized Cheap Trick,” Werman told Record Review magazine. “Those are great productions, among the best things I have ever done. Then of course I ate shit for all the work I did: ‘Werman’s slick production has taken the hard edge off the band,’ and all that.” – Ultimate Classic Rock Auf Wiedersehen The three albums produced by Tom Werman are the three best albums Cheap Trick ever made. The one in the middle, Heaven Tonight, even had a hit single and nearly cracked the Top 40. Things were looking up for the rising sons of the power pop scene, although it would take a live album from Japan to show us what had been blooming right under our noses. When The Beatles burst onto the international music scene in the mid 1960s, they started something they couldn’t finish. It wasn’t called “power pop” back then, but “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” were ridiculously catchy rock & roll songs that activated all your musical pleasure centers at once and sent you into a state of heightened ecstasy. Sadly, the Fab Four pulled the plug on the machine in 1970 and disassembled it. Electric Light Orchestra tried to rebuild the machine with classical parts a few years later, and Cheap Trick swapped out the strings for a bigger motor a few years after that. Both were a labor of love, not copycat replicas. Now, I won’t tell you that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Want You to Want Me” are the same thing. The Beatles were the product of an innocent age, and while they seemed perfectly content holding hands, Rick Nielsen had more amorous designs for his other hand. That was clear on the first album, less so on the next two albums as Nielsen toned down the lascivious wordplay. In fact, on the opening Surrender, Cheap Trick is outpartied by their own parents. The pop-band posing was mostly a ruse, while the rock & roll credentials were real. The rest of the record rolls even tighter than their last. – Progrography Heaven Tonight The band finally started to catch on to the world with the release of their third album, “Heaven Tonight”. The album was released on April 24, 1978 and what is interesting is four days later they were touring Japan and played at a little arena called Nippon Budokan and we will get to that story in the next review. First, we need to talk this album. The band’s third album, which in some circles is considered the best, but it is way too early to make that call. This one though does bring the best of the first two albums in to focus. It has some of the first albums raw sound and then it takes some of the power pop sounds of the second and makes a pretty damn fine combination. The album did well as it charted at #48 on the Billboard Charts and going Gold a year later. By 1995, it has since been certified Platinum. There are also two big firsts on this album. The first is they finally had a single chart with “Surrender” as it went to #62 on the Billboard Hot 100. The other first is more of a recording history fact in that this is the first recording to ever feature a 12-String Bass…yep…that is a right…12 strings. Not the wimpy-ass 4 string bass, nope four strings are for [redacted]. Only bad ass bass players play a 12 String bass!! Okay, I have no idea if that is true, but it sounds good…to me at least. This is also the second album in a row to feature only Robin Zander and Tom Petersson on the cover similar to ‘In Color’. Based on the cover, it looks like a standard background, but when you flip it over you see Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos standing in bathroom. Yes, great place for a group photo. As a result, the record company wanted to call the album ‘American Standard’ as that is a very popular brand of plumbing supplies. Thankfully, that was nixed and they went with the ‘Heaven Tonight’ title. – 2 Old 2 Loud Music Stiff Competition WHO’S TALKING TO WHO? Jimmy Kimmel: Tim Allen, Jack Quaid, Olivia Rodrigo Jimmy Fallon: Elle Fanning, Shawn Hatosy, Frankie Grande, Anthony Ramos Comics Unleashed: Elle Orlando, Randolph Davies, Sandy Danto, Landon Brown Seth Meyers: Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers, Finneas Watch What Happens Live: Emily Blunt, Colman Domingo The Daily Show: Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, host Desi Lydic [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/11/800048954/community/ivh-cheap-trick-heaven-tonight/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/